Since first becoming publicly available, the Internet and the World Wide Web have evolved dramatically. Web pages were initially available only with text, or text and images, and were typically hand-coded in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to be parsed and displayed by a web browser. In such early web pages, most or all of the content of the web page was explicitly recited within the HTML document, and was simply formatted for display by the web browser. With such pages, it was relatively simple for a search engine to extract information from web pages based on an examination of the web pages' source code. However, web pages have become increasingly more complex, and frequently do not explicitly include all of the coding necessary to render the content on the web page. In particular, coding for rich internet applications (RIAs) may not be included within the web page, but instead may be loaded by a playback routine from a remote server.
As such, performing searches on RIAs can be difficult as there may be no effective way to search the content of the RIA at a practical rate. While it may be possible to step through the RIA at its native frame rate, this can take a significant amount of time, particularly for RIAs having long animated sequences.